


to the beginnings of the earth

by openhearts



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Depression, F/M, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 02:59:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9528848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: “Hey it’s me.  I uh.  Britta moved.  Um, last weekend I guess.  We got all your stuff to the storage locker so that’s all done.  Except.  I have these boxes.  These two boxes.  I don’t actually know what’s in them, I just know one of them is yours.  They’re at my place.  So.  So when you come back- when you come back if you’re missing anything, let me know.  Maybe it’s here.”-Written after the series finale, and then it sat on my computer until . . . now?  January 2017. Insomnia's a hell of a drug.  Mind the tags for trigger warnings.





	

Nobody bothers him much about being sappy anymore and he can admit now that he likes it that way, finds it easier to not have to put up the front of being extra dickish to make up for it. Distance has made them all fonder of each other; sweeter and more patient if not always as involved.

After Annie and Abed leave Jeff works out and drinks and foregoes even the appearance of an attempt at dating. Britta’s the only one around who would really press him on it and she’s not really around once she decides to move into a basement apartment in a trendy neighborhood closer to Denver. She’ll commute to Greendale and take some online classes while working at a pet rescue.

Jeff stands in the living room of Abed and Troy’s/Abed and Annie and Troy’s/Abed and Annie’s/Abed and Annie and Britta’s apartment and looks around forlornly, lost and a little aggravated. It seems wrong that Britta would move out when her parents could more than afford to put up the full rent, no matter how fine it was to let the place go according to Abed and Annie. It’s not like Jeff can exactly break his own lease and live there with Britta until they came back, but the place was all of theirs and nobody else seems to care much but him. A storage locker had been arranged for Annie and Abed’s stuff and while Britta struggles her own boxes down the stairs she resolutely ignores the two movers hired by the Perrys for the day.

Jeff meets the movers at the locker after he sees Britta off - it’s another oddly final-feeling goodbye even though he’ll see her at school in the fall and she only lives about forty minutes away now - and oversees the loading of Annie and Abed’s sparse furniture and carefully packed boxes. The movers offer to help him unload his trunk too but he waves them off to meet Britta at her place and tips them in advance.

He opens the trunk after they drive off and eyes the two boxes there next to his gym bag. The keys to the locker tinkle in his hands as he fidgets with them for a minute before closing the trunk and then the door to the locker.

He sets the boxes in a corner of his living room and sits on the couch, watching TV and not looking at them from the corner of his eye for the rest of the day.

_

 

They get together to have their holiday weekend barbecue, celebrating the country’s independence and Abed’s visit home during a break from filming. It’s a given that they’ll get together because even though Jeff, Britta, Chang, Craig, and Frankie are certainly a group, there’s no pretending that they’re the group. But they operate like a family somehow anyway, still, even with only Jeff and Britta still remaining from that original italicized web of relationships.

They watches City College’s fireworks display from rickety lawn chairs on Greendale’s roof and drink until it isn’t fun anymore. Jeff saves Chang from falling off to his death by literally the seat of his pants. When Jeff falls into bed that night he looks at his phone blearily. There's a group text from Troy with a few pictures of fireworks over water from the deck of the boat and replies from Shirley and Annie, oohing and aahing. Jeff clumsily taps out a reply all:

“Missed u”

_

 

He drinks too much. This is a fact that sits quietly in the corner of his mind that he knows, but he also knows why he does it, and that cancels out the other voice quickly and effectively from sip to sip. He’s got nowhere to be for another few weeks until he needs to pretend to prep anything for the fall semester so he drinks on his couch alone, staring at cardboard boxes.

He would have kept them a secret before, would have admitted to this streak of desperate sentimentality only on a special occasion couched in smirks and speeches. At four p.m. on a Thursday he’s stripped of that: alone, sitting in his living room as usual, TV quietly muttering, blinds drawn, dishes on the coffee table, the complete picture of self-neglect. It’s perfectly cliched and so he does a perfectly cliched thing that makes his heart pound hard against his ribs and his throat close up so he can barely talk.

“Hey it’s me. I uh. Britta moved. Um, last weekend I guess. We got all your stuff to the storage locker so that’s all done. Except. I have these boxes. These two boxes. I don’t actually know what’s in them, I just know one of them is yours. They’re at my place. So. So when you come back- when you come back if you’re missing anything, let me know. Maybe it’s here.”

_

 

Shirley comes with her family for a long weekend before her boys start school. Jeff takes them and Britta all out for dinner and they talk and laugh and he drinks four margaritas with beer chasers and has to take a cab home.

When he goes for his wallet to pay he finds a card Shirley must have stuffed in his pocket with the address for an AA meeting near him. He shoves some money at the cabbie and stumbles up to his apartment. He takes the crumbled piece of paper from his pocket and smoothes it out a little and sets it on top of one of the cardboard boxes before grabbing a beer from the fridge and falling into bed with it still unopened.

He stares at that paper out of the corner of his eye the whole next day, pretending he’s not looking up the address and meeting times on his phone. He gets up and shovels some spinach chips into his mouth while he makes a protein shake, takes a shower and gets dressed and stands in his empty apartment for ten minutes like he’s forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.

He texts Shirley. It’s not even anything, it’s just “I” and then nothing and she texts back within a minute:

“It’s okay. Don’t think about it, just go.”

He doesn’t answer, just grabs his keys and drives to the address and sits in the meeting sweating - they couldn’t find a place with air conditioning? - and jamming the storage locker key into the pad of his thumb. He doesn’t know what a typical meeting size is but this one must have forty people so there’s little fanfare when he gets up in the middle and leaves, just a brief look exchanged with the guy by the folding table of coffee and snacks in the back of the room.

He drives, and he doesn’t think, and he gets to where he didn’t realize he was going and gets out and opens the door and sits on the small patch of floor that’s free in the storage locker of Annie and Abed’s stuff. It kind of smells like the apartment in there, just from the presence of all of it. He tries to call Abed but he doesn’t have enough signal so he just texts him:

“I think I understand the Dreamatorium now.”

Abed replies with several thumbs up emojis and Jeff smiles. Then he cries.

_

 

Jeff and Craig and Frankie have gotten together a few times without telling Chang - though nobody ever really tells Chang anything, he just knows and shows up and won’t leave - or Britta. They drink good wine and eat sophisticated appetizers and watch Game of Thrones.

It’s been a week and a few days since Jeff went to that meeting and then the storage locker where he sat on the floor and cried for an undisclosed period of time and since then he’s not bought more alcohol. He’s drank what he already has, which is a considerable amount and variety, at a perhaps slightly slower than usual rate, and there’s a significant enough dent in the inventory that he would have stocked back up by now otherwise. 

Otherwise. It was a good otherwise he lived in before, where he cried like a man only when confronted with painful childhood memories. He texts Shirley when it occurs to him:

“If I ever share I’m telling them you caused this by hitting me in the dick with that foosball handle.”

“I’ll make amends next time I see you my friend.”

“Make mine those double chocolate ones with the coconut filling.”

He’s spending his Sunday afternoon thinking about that and idly drowning in anxiety about trying to interact normally with Craig and Frankie. They get there a few hours later and Jeff drinks the wine they bring and adds a bottle of his own and thinks about not drinking. About explaining that he’s not drinking. The thing is they might not make a big deal of it. The whole reason they do these little get togethers is to be fucking grownups for more than five minutes at a time, and to not have to explain half their pop culture references to Annie or Troy - though that’s obviously a long lost vestige of an annoyance at this point. 

But they don’t talk about anything personal and the entirety of Jeff’s existence is so highly painfully personal now that there are no longer six voices supplying the commentary he’s used to, the group hugs he finally not only submitted to but literally embraced, or the distractions of six other self-involved messy problematic people who spilled their issues out over each other like paint on canvases.

He keeps quiet about all of that and watches the show and eats some sweet pepper slices stuffed with goat cheese and joins in the discussions of “If Tyrion were President…” and “who would win Top Model: Sansa, Daenerys, Margaery, or Cersei.”

He’s buzzed when they leave, or what he would have called buzzed and now admits with little fanfare or protest is more accurately ‘halfway numb.’ He goes to bed and dreams about Annie taming dragons.

_

 

He goes to another meeting. He leaves early again. He doesn’t text Shirley and she hasn’t been texting him and he’s not really doing this he’s just not not doing it. 

Abed comes back a week early, the last week of July; production wrapped and they didn’t have him stay on for editing but he got a decent recommendation. He gets a studio apartment in Greendale near his dad’s and Jeff helps him move his stuff from the storage locker. 

“This isn’t a Dreamatorium,” Abed says, eyeing Jeff as they stand in the half-emptied space.

“Put some tape on the walls you might reconsider,” Jeff pants. Abed’s stuff is fucking heavy and Abed is more of a delegator than a lifter.

Abed shakes his head. “The Dreamatorium is all about possibilities. It can be anything, anywhere, anytime. It’s a vehicle. There’s too much stuff here with all its own context and meaning attached already.”

“Yeah, but all this stuff was just waiting here for you and Annie to get back. Isn’t that all about possibilities?”

“There’s nothing new to create here. Unless you want to empty out all Annie’s boxes and we can make some costumes-”

“Settle down, season three.”

“Do you need a Dreamatorium Jeff?”

Jeff looks around for a moment. He shrugs, half-smiles, and glances back at his car, stalling. “I don’t think I’d know what to do with it if I had one.”

Abed tilts his head and Jeff lets the silence sit and he has a faint feeling he should be crashing right now, should be sitting down and crying again, but somehow he doesn’t. Somehow it doesn’t seem necessary at the moment. He’ll take that.

Abed’s place as a big walk in closet and Jeff notices one of the boxes has a huge roll of green tape. He puts the box in the closet even though it’s marked ‘kitchen.’

_

 

A few days later Abed calls him, asking who packed his DVDs because “A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF CRIME CAPER CLASSICS ARE MISSING, JEFF, A VERY SIGNIFICANT NUMBER.”

Jeff glances at the boxes still sitting benignly in the corner of his living room and tells Abed he’ll be right over before hanging up. 

He hands the box over and Abed of course completely misses his slightly sheepish expression, grabbing it from him and opening it immediately to check through its contents.

“All there?” Jeff asks, glancing around the place as Abed kneels beside the full wall of rickety Goodwill bookshelves that surround his TV and hold his DVDs.

“What’s this?” Abed asks, and when Jeff glances over he sees the piece of paper in Abed’s hand and blinks.

“Shit, that’s. Um.” He pauses, considering lying and saying he doesn’t know, but Abed knows Shirley’s handwriting and knowing Abed he knows what’s at that address. “It’s for an AA meeting. Shirley gave it to me when she visited.”

“Oh. Are you in AA?”

Jeff shrugs. “Does it count if you leave early and don’t really listen?”

Abed tilts his head. “Students can pass your class doing the same thing. You teach your class doing the same thing. Are you still a teacher?”

Jeff stops pacing slowly and pivots on his feet to collapse onto the threadbare couch. “More than I was a lawyer,” he mutters, and rubs his hands over his face. 

The couch shifts, and Abed’s sitting next to him. He puts his hand on Jeff’s shoulder.

“D’you think I’m fucked up Abed?”

“I don’t think I’m-”

“You’re my friend. You’re qualified. Do you think I need to be in AA?”

“You used to stop drinking while you were still happy.”

Jeff blows a breath out at that. Abed’s hand still lays still on his shoulder. Jeff feels very very small. He slumps into Abed’s side a little, and Abed turns and faces forward, hands folded over his lap, and lets Jeff’s weight tip him a little to one side on the couch.

_

 

It’s summer, so it’s boring and things stall and move along slowly and same-ly toward fall. But Jeff drinks a little less. He goes to a few more meetings. Craig and Frankie come over and he eats appetizers and doesn’t end the night slurring and numb. He Skypes with Shirley and she never asks him about AA, just talks about the latest church lady gossip and he laughs and never asks how her dad is doing. Britta comes out a few times and they have to reschedule a planned visit with her parents once but Jeff doesn’t even complain about eating at her favorite vegan place instead of having the lobster mac and cheese he specifically saved calories for all week.

He hangs out with Abed a lot. One evening Abed’s texting pretty much nonstop and Jeff asks who he’s talking to and Abed answers “Annie.”

“Tell her I said ‘hi.’”

“You could tell her yourself, she’s not busy.”

“Did she say when she’s coming back? Pretty soon right?”

Abed glances at Jeff, then at Jeff’s phone, meaningfully. He looks at his own phone in his hands and actually turns it over a bit, inspecting it, before it dings again. Jeff rubs his hands over his jeans nervously and turns back to the movie.

“She comes back next Saturday,” Abed adds a few minutes later, when Jeff has almost forgotten he’s still sitting there.

Jeff hadn’t been consciously thinking about Annie very much. There were the occasional group texts and that one voicemail which she’d never acknowledged. He’d told her he’d let her go and that was true. When he kissed her it was five years of her he was kissing, and they were the last five years and not the next five. He wasn’t bullshitting her anymore, and not just because he finally admitted how fully she had always seen through him. When he said hands, head, heart, he meant it. It didn’t matter that those parts of him felt empty and raw and useless, it wasn’t her job to fill them for him.

A lot of Winger speeches were coming back to bite him in the ass lately.

There had been that other kiss. The little peck on the lips at the airport that neither of them had initiated more or less than the other. The one that felt like some secret little defiance against their own script of the dramatic goodbye before a contrived absence. That kiss was brief and light and hardly even a kiss. But somehow her smile and the lightness in her and the fact that though it was still brand new they had started some version of a new chapter already since that proper goodbye kiss . . . all that made it feel entirely different from the rest of the times he’s kissed her. Even in his head. 

He hasn’t been counting on anything happening when she gets back. She was only leaving for ten weeks but that day, that night, it wasn’t the future they were saying goodbye to, it was the past six years. Ending a chapter that had been odd and intense and drawn out and messy and painful, so fucking painful and scary and inconvenient. He had to let all that go. Had to let six years of her go. And yes there had been little acknowledgements on both their parts that, get real, ten weeks and then she’s back and next year we will both be back and Greendale so settle down. But that level of avoidance was what they used to be about. Now he admits freely that when he kissed her in the study room is was important, it meant something big, and he had no idea what would come next. If anything would come next. Relationships, friendships, they faded away all the time and that could be them now. She could come back and finish up at Greendale and they could never share one of those looks, one of those smiles, one of those kisses again. 

That’s what he’s been working with. As he’s been not thinking much about Annie.

“Jeff?”

“Huh?”

“You’re doing a silent version of Goldbluming.”

_

 

He knows it wasn’t coincidence that his drinking had ramped up this year - and he’s still talking about it in that kind of third person way where he doesn’t acknowledge that “I started drinking more this year, particularly after my friends all left,” and he’s still leaving meetings early and not introducing himself and going only occasionally without much sense of routine - and he knows it wasn’t coincidence that it was when he was alone that Shirley’s note pushed him into actual action. 

He’s walking into a meeting on Saturday - the second one he’s been to this week, and it has nothing to do with the fact that that single remaining cardboard box in his apartment seemed to have grown to about nine times its size and was taking up all the air in the room - when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He checks it as he sits down, and when he reads the text he immediately gets back up and walks out. But he pauses before he gets to the doorway, by that same guy who stands by the coffee and snacks table every time, and looks him in the eyes, phone still clutched in his hand. 

“I’m Jeff,” he says. He can feel himself Goldbluming.

He doesn’t add the rest of the greeting that’s expected at these meetings. He’s not sure it fully applies to him and he doesn’t know if he’s supposed to say it regardless of whether he believes it because obviously he’s there but the guy just holds out his hand to shake and says, “hi, I’m Mark.”

Jeff leaves. 

He gets in his car, starts it, pulls out of the parking lot, and heads toward the airport.

_

 

Ten weeks is hardly a long time in many contexts but in this one it feels like as many years. Suddenly losing the entirety of the rest of the group within a week had been devastating in a way that was so much more quiet and ordinary than he’d thought something like devastation could be. Other losses in his life had been sudden or inconsequential or both, not this long slow limp to aloneness that felt so inevitable. And sure, there were Craig and Frankie and even Chang. But they weren’t the group.

And this isn’t about the group either, but Annie, and everything about JeffandAnnie had always been so inextricable from the group that driving to the airport to pick her up feels like maybe he’ll somehow get back everything he’s been missing once he gets his arms around her.

He parks and walks in, picking his way through little clumps of slow-moving families with toddlers and older relatives and just generally inexperienced slow travellers. He gets to the big open walkway where she’ll exit toward baggage claim, and finds an open stretch of wall to lean against and check his phone. Nothing new. He glances again at the text Abed had sent him earlier, asking him to pick Annie up since Abed’s car was making a weird noise. The excuse was suspect but clearly Jeff wasn’t about to question it. He realizes he doesn’t know where he’ll be taking her; Abed’s place is a studio and yeah he has a couch but unless she had a place lined up to rent already Jeff couldn’t see that working for long. He realizes that he, too, basically only has a couch to offer, but at least there’s a bedroom too. It would-

He stops. Forces himself to, and jams the storage locker key against the pad of his thumb for good measure.

He thinks about telling her he’s going to AA, and wonders again if that’s kind of a lie because of all “going to AA” implies. 

He doesn’t tell her. 

She kisses him hello, and later, good morning.

_


End file.
